Should the EU introduce an extra copyright for news sites, restricting how we can share news online? The controversy around this plan continues to brew – this time in the Council, where the member state governments are trying to find a consensus.

[...]

The Bulgarian Council Presidency is pushing what it calls a new compromise, instead of the choice of two options that their Estonian predecessors offered.

But upon closer investigation, the “compromise” looks mighty familiar: With exceptions for very short snippets and non-commercial use by individuals, as well as a shorter protection term than the Commission wanted, it looks much like the current German “ancillary copyright”, which almost all experts agree has been an abject failure.

The failure of snippet taxes/Google taxes is well documented, but never seems to deter further legislative efforts in the same direction. Google reacted to the initiative by dropping snippets from German news agencies, a move that produced a noticeable drop in traffic. German publishers called it "blackmail," but the simplest way to comply with bad laws is to opt out. Similar things happened in Spain with its snippet tax. Google nuked its local Google News service, resulting in affected publishers demanding the government force Google to re-open the service and start sending them traffic/money.

This push in the EU Commission for a snippet tax deliberately ignores research showing link taxes don't work, harm publishers, and are opposed by many of the journalists who would supposedly benefit from it. This is more than cherry-picking facts to support a Google tax. Pirate Party EU Parliament member Julia Reda (who wrote the post quoted above) previously uncovered reports the Commission tried to bury, including one that showed news aggregation services like Google News were a net benefit for listed publications.

At this point, it looks as though some form of snippet tax will eventually become EU law. Only half of the member countries oppose snippet taxes, and only a few of those are actively fighting the proposal. If it does become law, it won't work out the way publishers believe it will. Instead, it will harm smaller publishers and smaller aggregators, resulting in a consolidation of power for the largest publishers and platforms. The EU has no leverage in this battle. Google won't hang around for long if the situation is unprofitable and publishers will have to settle for taxing Yahoo, Bing, etc. for whatever traffic these search engines manage to send their way.

from the evidence-based-policymaking dept

For many years we've criticized copyright policymakers who rely on "faith-based" policymaking. That is, they believe that copyright is inherently "good" and refuse to consider any evidence showing harms from copyright that is too strong, or refuse to concede that there may be better ways to create incentives or to remunerate creators beyond copyright. The idea of actually having evidence-based copyright has long seemed like a pipedream -- and apparently the EU Commission would like to keep it that way. Back in September, we wrote about how the EU Commission spent $400,000 on a study that showed unauthorized downloads had little impact on sales -- and then refused to release the report, recognizing that it would undermine the narrative they were pushing in trying to expand anti-piracy laws.

And, now, another such "buried" report has been discovered. As with the last one, this new report was discovered by Pirate Party EU Parliament Member Julia Reda, though she used the standard EU Freedom of Information process that anyone else could have used. After discovering that last report, she made a request for all copyright related studies that the EU Commission had requested since 2013, even if they were unpublished. That initial request listed out some papers that were still in progress -- including the one that Reda has now released. This study is one that a lot of news publishers almost certainly wished would have never seen the light of day -- which might explain why the EU Commission kept it buried.

The report focuses on the question of news aggregators and what impact they're having on news publishers. As you may recall, publishers around the globe -- but especially in Europe -- have been insisting that aggregators like Google News are somehow responsible for their own business failures, and are demanding that Google pay them for the awful crime of sending them traffic. The fact that these publishers could easily block Google from sending them traffic -- but refuse to do so -- reveals that they really do find that traffic valuable. But they still want payments on top of it, and will continue to demonize Google News and other aggregators until they get it. And, indeed, the EU Commission continues to suggest that forcing aggregators to pay publishers would be a good idea.

But, perhaps not surprisingly, the study that the Commission requested shows the exact opposite of what the publishers claim. Looking at situations in Spain and Germany -- both countries that tried to force Google to pay -- gives some real world evidence that is inconvenient for publishers and those pushing for these kinds of laws:

The available empirical evidence shows that news aggregators have a positive impact on news publishers' advertising revenue.

The research goes through a number of different empirical studies to conclude this. It notes that there are two competing forces, and the empirical question is which force wins out. News publishers insist that aggregators work as a substitute for their sites, while aggregators (and others!) insist that they're complementary, and that news aggregators drive more traffic, which the publishers can then monetize. It then cites a whole bunch of studies presenting empirical evidence that the complementary effects far outweigh the substitution effects. As the paper concludes:

We can conclude from this overview that the studies published so far contain no empirical evidence in support of the substitution hypothesis and thus no evidence that online aggregators have a negative impact on original newspaper publishers' revenue. On the contrary, the evidence shows that aggregators may actually be complements to newspaper websites and may help consumer discover more news and boost the number of visits.

All of this seems like, damn, it would be kind of useful if you were trying to create good copyright policy. But instead the report was completely buried and hidden, while the EU Commission to this day continues to push for policies that insist the substitution effect is stronger than the complementary effect. Even though the evidence that the very same Commission asked for shows that's untrue.

So, once again, it's feeling like evidence-based copyright remains a pipedream. What's unfortunate, though, is that in the past we felt it was a pipedream because no one was willing to do the research. Now it appears it's a pipedream because policymakers, when shown the evidence, will do everything possible to hide it, rather than to use it to create more effective and reasonable copyright laws.

from the definition-of-insanity dept

Nine European press agencies, including AFP, called Wednesday on internet giants to be forced to pay copyright for using news content on which they make vast profits.

The call comes as the EU is debating a directive to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to.

"Facebook has become the biggest media in the world," the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde.

"Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom... They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe's departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground."

"Access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth," the agencies argued.

"At the end of the chain, informing the public costs a lot of money."

This is a doomed idea. First off, if the demands are a pain to implement, news agencies can expect to start seeing referral traffic drop as other news sources not tied to payment demands see their search engine stock rise. If they continue to press for a cut of these companies "billions," they can expect to be cut off completely. This isn't hypothetical.

Second, any agency that wants to cut off the search engines supposedly bleeding them dry can always block the engines' crawlers. But this obviously isn't about killing off search engine hits and Facebook sharing -- it's about dipping a hand into pockets of service providers for having the audacity to expand the reach of European news agencies.

Finally, there's nothing in it for news agencies even if they succeed in getting a snippet tax implemented. They see companies worth billions and think skimming a little off the top will put them back in the black permanently. But anyone who knows anything about ad payouts knows CPM "taxes" aren't the road to riches. In reality, any implemented scheme would involve hundreds of news sites divvying up fractions of cents between themselves for search result impressions. Payouts might be slightly higher for more direct clicks from referrers like Facebook, but at best, new agencies should expect a few bucks a month from a link tax, rather than the thousands (or millions) they envision.

The news agencies supporting this move are complaining about declining ad revenue and think charging platforms for sending them traffic is the solution. This has been tried and it hasn't worked, but hope springs eternal when you're all out of innovative ideas.

from the stop-drinking-the-koolaid dept

Last year we wrote about News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson's weird anti-Google rant that seemed quite devoid of facts. It was a odd amalgamation of conspiracy theory and outright falsehoods that fit more in the realm of an angry internet troll, rather than the CEO of a media conglomerate. Apparently, Thomson has continued to let these beliefs fester and has once again gone off on Google and other companies much more successful on the internet in a confused and rambling speech in Australia. The talk, focused on the future of the media industry, starts off with a philosophical discussion about China before jumping into an attack on the internet, which begins mildly enough with some digs at internet companies:

Media companies, too, are looking for their bearings. Here we are in the age of the GPS, of relentless, endless tracking and precisely precise data, and yet some in media are wandering aimlessly, dazed and confused, without coordinates and slouching towards oblivion. We are living in the decade of content distribution, which is not necessarily good for the act of creation. For journalists and newspapers are creationists, not in the biblical sense, but in the creative sense – I am fortunate to be a custodian in a company that invests in thousands of creative acts around the world each day, great journalism, compelling analysis, feisty blogs, captivating videos and brilliant books, fiction and non-fiction. The question for this creationist is whether my views are anti-evolutionary or anti e-evolution – already a bit backward and sliding ever more so.

For the distributionists do indeed have powerful distribution channels, Google and Facebook, and pretenders like LinkedIn, which is spam central. None of them actually create content, and they certainly have little intention of paying for it, but they do redistribute the content created by others – they would argue that such redistribution is a natural extension of their role as social networks. I would argue that much of the redistribution is an unnatural act. But there are broader issues that are still unfolding for media companies, who are themselves struggling to profit from their news and other content, while the distributionists are helping themselves to that content, coopting and corralling audiences and consciously devaluing brands. The supposed idealism of these companies is in stark contrast to their actual behavior. That Google’s newly conceived parent company is to be called Alphabet has itself created a range of delicious permutations: A is for Avarice, B is for Bowdlerize, through to K for Kleptocracy, P for Piracy and Z for Zealotry.

Of course, this gets pretty much everything wrong. They're not distributors, they tend to be marketing vehicles. And there are all sorts of things that are just silly about this. After all, News Corp. itself has a rather long history of building or buying its own aggregation tools that tend to be a lot more aggressive than the Googles or Facebooks of the world. Oh, but nearly all of News Corp.'s attempts have flopped.

The reality, it seems, is that Thomson is jealous that Google and Facebook have succeeded in building services that people find useful, whereas News Corp. has failed. So he lashes out claiming that they're "pirating" or "stealing" content, and "redistributing" it. But that's not what's happening at all. Google is a search engine, it's helping people find more content. And, as a recent study in Spain showed, when Google News pulled out it harmed the news industry, rather than helped it. It took away traffic and hurt ad revenue.

What kind of person slams a company that increases his company's revenue and increases his company's visibility?

Apparently, the chief exec of News Corp., Robert Thomson.

All of this seems to stem from a simple bit of (willful?) misunderstanding. Thomson keeps claiming that Google and Facebook are somehow "distributing" News Corp. content. But they're not. They're helping people promote it or find it. And they're very successful at doing so, and that's the real problem. Thomson is jealous of their success.

It should be reassuring for news organisations that the distributors have suddenly started to realize that the quality of content is important, particularly as they try to build walled gardens – though it should be noted that the Chinese discovered that even a Great Wall didn’t work. The spammers at LinkedIn discovered that CVs are only burnished occasionally and anyone who tweaks their CV a few times a week is probably not worth hiring. Anyway, they now see themselves as a news distributor, and news organizations who cozy up too closely to them are guilty of techno trendiness. It is patently important to be aware of the trends but a grievous sin to be too trendy.

Whatever you might think of Linkedin or its recent strong push into being a content platform, this seems like a weirdly inappropriate insult for a major media company boss to be making. First of all, I think most hiring managers would strongly disagree with Thomson's suggestion that Linkedin isn't useful as a tool for hiring people. These days it's one of the first places people go. Is Thomson so out of touch that he doesn't realize this?

And we are entering a new phase of development by the big distribution networks, a phase in which they are not only appropriating content but deciding what content is appropriate and inappropriate. They are appointing editors not to create but to curate. And these curators tend to have a certain mindset, a deep fondness for political correctness, and a tendency to be intolerant of ideological infractions. Silicon Valley is moving from the PC to being a purveyor of the PC.

Huh? First off, anyone looking at this with any sense of reality would note that News Corp. has a much longer history of acting as a gatekeeper, greatly limiting what content it feels is "appropriate" for people to see. Google and Facebook are quite different, opening up a much broader sense of content to the world. Are there reasonable concerns about algorithms choosing what content you see and things like a "filter bubble"? Sure. Absolutely. But comparing that to News Corp. of all places doesn't make News Corp. look very good. Remember, this is the same company who turned the tag line "fair & balanced" into a punchline. For the CEO of that company to argue that Google and Facebook are somehow curating content in one direction is... well... ironic.

Of course, what it really comes down to is the fact that Thomson doesn't like the political sensibilities of the people who run these tech companies:

This transition is already underway. The stream of content is often a flow of soft-left sensibility, a stream of content consciousness in which genuine debate is in danger of drowning and alternative views rarely surface. This profound movement is taking place, and without much serious discussion of the social consequences.

Newspapers have always been a little unruly, but they are characterised by public debate, wrangling, haggling, arguing, sometimes passionately about issues and consequences, about the impact on societies and on people. The philosophy, the point of great newspapers is clear. But now we have the exponential growth of purportedly neutral platforms built by e-elites that will be far from neutral, far from objective, succumbing to a stultifyingly samey subjectivity and sensibility.

Again, remember that this is all coming from News Corp.. If he really feels this way, why not just build a competing platform that has News Corp.s' political "sensibilities." After all, isn't that what the company did with Fox News? Why not do that online and see how it works? That's what's nice about the internet. Anyone can build anything and see if it works.

After some more whining about how those darn "lefties" are running Silicon Valley, he goes back to attacking Google over "intellectual property" issues that he doesn't seem to understand.

More relevant to our discussion is the digital divot; the deficit in reporting resources created by the egregious aggregation of news by distributors for whom provenance is an inconvenience and who are contemptuous of copyright. The words Intellectual Property don’t appear in the Google alphabet. Without proper recognition, without proper remuneration, well-resourced reporting will be ever more challenged. When I arrived in Beijing, many a US newspaper had China correspondents – now some of those papers no longer exist in printed form.

Mismanagement played a role, as did journalistic hubris, but the digital age has been hostile to investment in reporters and reporting. Why pay professionals when you have UGC, user-generated content? And why pay when you can purloin?

Except, again, none of that is accurate. Google, for one, seems to bend over backwards going above and beyond what's required by law to appease Hollywood and firms like News Corp., only to find them still wanting more or plotting against Google. And, it's funny that this speech comes the very same week that Comcast plowed $200 million into Vox Media at a $1 billion valuation and Buzzfeed's financials leaked showing a healthy, growing business that's investing heavily in editorial.

In other words: it appears that online reporting is actually doing pretty damn well in certain areas -- just not those where News Corp. is acting -- once again highlighting the company's long history of driving internet properties into the ground.

Also, we'll mention (yet again) the study in Spain, noting that Google was helping news publishers make more money and get a larger audience by promoting stories for free. It takes quite a bit of confusion to spin that as being "hostile to investment in reporters and investing."

It's just factually wrong.

If this is the visionary running News Corp. and planning for its future, it seems like News Corp. is heading in the wrong direction.

from the how-low-can-you-go? dept

Here on Techdirt, we have been following with a certain bemusement attempts by a numberofEuropeangovernments to bring in laws that would grant newspaper and magazine owners a special "ancillary" copyright over snippets -- actually a thinly-disguised attempt to tax Google. Despite the miserable failure of this ploy, Austria has decided it wants to join the club, as reported here by the Initiative Against Ancillary Copyright site:

The Austrian proposal is very similar to the German law. Producers of "newspapers and magazines" shall be granted an exclusive right only against commercial providers of search engines and news aggregators. As in Germany, this right is also supposed to only last for one year. But there remains one big difference: The draft does not include an exception for "single words and shortest text-snippets" which expands the scope of the right tremendously!

That's something of an understatement.

Assuming Austria goes ahead and brings in this change (it's currently a draft amendment to the country's copyright law), it will surely learn the hard way that it doesn't help publishers. What's more worrying is that there is an amendment (number 204 - pdf) to the proposed revision of the EU copyright directive, that seeks to bring in this crazy idea across all 28 member states:

Notes that the current legal framework provides for neighbouring rights for performers, phonogram producers, film producers and broadcasting companies, but not for press publishers; calls on the Commission, therefore, to analyse whether neighbouring rights for press publishers can provide appropriate protection and remuneration for their work in a digital media world;

There's an important vote on Tuesday that will determine whether that amendment is adopted, along with some of the hundreds of others that have been proposed. Let's hope that the European politicians bear in mind how badly the idea has turned out every time it has been tried before.

from the taxing-google dept

Apparently ignoring just how badly this worked out for publishers in Germany, the Spanish Parliament has passed a law to fine aggregators and search engines for using snippets or linking to infringing content. As plenty of folks have described, the bill is clearly just a Google tax. As we had discussed, the proposed bill would be a disaster for digital commons/open access projects. There had been some thought that the proposed bill might be delayed because of a referral to the EU Court of Justice on a related issue, but apparently that didn't happen. Either way, it looks like the bill kept the ridiculous "inalienable right" to being paid for snippets -- meaning that Creative Commons-type licenses may not even be allowed, and people won't even be allowed to offer up their content for free. That's ridiculous.

It appears that almost everyone dislikes the law that passed. On the internet/aggregator side of things, the law doesn't make any sense at all, and seems likely to harm any sort of aggregator setup. And, meanwhile, those who want greater copyright expansion felt the law was a "missed opportunity" that is described as "vague and weak." I guess the silver lining is that "it could have been worse."

This idea of taxing aggregators for promoting your content is still completely ridiculous. It remains to be seen if Google takes the same approach as it did in Germany, removing the snippets of those who protest, only to have them begging to put them back -- except that, unlike in Germany, the newspapers may not be able to grant a free license thanks to the whole "inalienable right" thing. Either way, it's unfortunate that this seems to be the direction Europe is heading in. These kinds of laws are a recipe for chilling effects on innovation online, scaring companies away from doing useful things.

from the well-look-at-that dept

It's no secret that almost no one who isn't employed by an airline really understands airline pricing, but in playing around with some flight search/booking tools, I recently came across something interesting, suggesting that if you're doing multi-city tours, it may pay to not let a flight search tool know that. I have a bit of travel coming up in the near future that's going to involve a bunch of stops. While I was booking the flights, I noticed some oddities. In pre-planning the trip, I had done some spot checks on pricing for flights between various cities -- plugging them into Expedia to see what came up, just to get a sense of what the cost would be. However, when it came time to book, I did one big "multi-city" list of flights, and was surprised that what came back seemed significantly more expensive than what my mental estimate had been from the spot check. So I went back, and looked what would happen if I booked each leg individually... and the prices went way down -- back to what I had seen with the spot checks. Hmm. In the end, if I had booked the multi-city flights for the exact same flights it would have been more than double the cost than if I booked the flights individually (which I did).

I decided to mess around and see if this was true in other situations and on other travel search engines. Because I really don't feel like broadcasting my travel plans/flight times/flight dates/destinations to the world, I tried it again with a made up itinerary, which I used to demonstrate the situation below. I did all of the searches within minutes of each other and went back and redid a few of the searches to make sure that my own searches weren't somehow influencing the pricing (they didn't -- if I went back and did the same searches, I still got the same prices). I will say that on my actual flights, the multi-city price was even higher and the individual flight costs were even lower than with this example that I show, so the spread was even bigger than seen here, though this example still gives a decent spread. First up, here's my example "multi-city" itinerary as per Expedia:

As you can see, three flights, total price: $2,891. Okay, now find the exact same flights on the exact same day and time, but do the searches individually. Here are the results:

Same exact flights. But the individual prices are $494, $723 and $477. That adds up to $1,694. Still kinda pricey for three flights, but well, well, well below $2,891. For the exact same flights. Yes, Expedia might show all of your flights in a single page itinerary on the website, but is that really worth $1,197? Seems doubtful. I mentioned this on Twitter, and someone suggested that the "risk" of booking individually is that they don't know if you're going to miss a connection, which does make sense on flights that are connecting flights. But none of these are. They're all different flights on different airlines on different days.

I was curious if other search engines would show the same thing. First up, was Expedia's main competitor in being the "big legacy" player, Travelocity. I haven't used that site in years, and discovered that their interface is incredibly annoying (it also seems to be one of the only flight search engines I can find that doesn't try to autofill airports as you type). Rather than showing the full package upfront, Travelocity makes me pick each flight, so I did -- and picked the exact same flights:

Now, here's our first clue into what's going on. Even though I very clearly had the box checked for only "coach/economy" seats, Travelocity put me in business class on that last flight. There was no option to change that at all, and other combinations more or less turned up the same thing. I have no idea why they did this, but the overall price was just a few dollars more than Expedia:

Also, in case you're curious, when I just did the single flight search for that final leg, Travelocity doesn't say it needs to be a business class ticket. Instead, it shows a coach ticket with a price not too far off from the Expedia price:

I have no idea why Travelocity sneaks in that business class seat (and it's not clear if that's what Expedia is doing too, though I suspect it may be). Then I decided to move on and test some of the next generation of flight search/booking sites, starting with Hipmunk, which I really like. The end result... about the same, though a tad more expensive.

Now, on this one there are two other things to discuss. First, while it's not clear from the way it's shown here, that first flight is not a coach seat either. The only options presented by Hipmunk were "premium economy" on SAS flights or business class on Brussels Air, even though if you search individually, there are coach seats available. Hmmm. So that's the second search engine that throws in a semi-hidden (you can only see it on mouseover) upgraded seat, which probably contributes to the massive price jump (though on Hipmunk it's the first flight, as opposed to the last one on Travelocity).

The other thing you might notice is that the final flight on Hipmunk is actually not the same. That's because, when doing the multicity search, Hipmunk doesn't even show that 8pm flight. You can see it if I expand out and it shows the final leg options.

With the multi-city search, Hipmunk only shows those two morning flights. I still chose the Iberia flight, since I was trying to keep it somewhat consistent with the other searches. If I had made a few different selections, I could have decreased the total by a bit, but not by that much. Oh, and it's not like Hipmunk can't find that 8pm flight. Do a single search, rather than multi-city and, boom, there it is:

Someone on Twitter suggested trying Kayak, and that turned up something interesting and different!

Hey, look! That first package looks an awful lot like the individual pricing that I found on Expedia. And note the little "Hacker Fare" note. If you mouseover, they explain that to get that rate, you may have to buy flights separately. Hmm. A Kayak blog post notes that such "hacker fares" are usually about finding better two "one-way" flights for a roundtrip. Except that's not what's happening here, since none of these are round trips. They're all the same flights. Except... actually, with Kayak... they're not. These aren't the same flights. One of the criteria I had used above was that I was seeking out non-stop flights, and to get the cheap fares via Kayak, you had to take one or two "1 stop" flights. In the side bar, there are check boxes for things like that, and so I "forced" it to only look for nonstop flights... and Kayak told me no such flights existed.

That seems odd. All the other search engines could find three nonstop flights. For what it's worth, I also checked Orbitz, and Orbitz actually had an even better deal, getting the price all the way down to $1,227.29 -- lower even than my individual flights, but there are caveats. All three of the flights involve layovers, and the final one is an overnight layover, so if timing is important, that might not work.

Oddly, Orbitz basically doesn't show any non-stop options until you get to the second page of results. If you just looked at the first page, you might be led to believe that there aren't even direct flights between these cities at all. Also, as far as I can tell, Orbitz, like Kayak, absolutely refuses to offer any way to take all three flights as non-stop, despite the fact that they clearly exist.

After going through all of this, I reached out to folks at Hipmunk, to see if they could explain the result. Hipmunk's Adam Goldstein kindly explained the basic situation, noting that airlines have all sorts of rules about what tickets can be combined with others. If you've never dealt with the insane details of fare classes (which go way beyond seating classes), you can spend way too much time online reading the crazy details. Given that, it seems that it is these kinds of "fare classes" that are the "culprit" -- and by "culprit" I mean the way in which the airlines force you into spending much, much, much more than you need to.

That said, Goldstein also argues that there are downsides to buying individual flights. He brings up, as we discussed above, the issue of connecting flights (and also having bags checked all the way through to destination) -- but as noted, that doesn't apply in this situation. He also points out that if you have to "change or cancel your whole trip, you have to pay separate change/cancel fees for each booking, instead of one for the whole thing." That's absolutely true, but is that "insurance" worth paying twice as much? I could rebook my entire trip with different times and dates... and basically pay the same total amount. So... that argument doesn't make much sense.

In the end, it really feels like a scammy way of making fliers pay a lot more than they need to, without them realizing it. What I do know, however, is that if you're looking for the best deals, do not assume that a multi-city search will turn up the cheapest prices -- and also recognize that the different search engines can give out extremely different answers. For example, if price was the only concern, and short flight times/non-stop flights were less important, then obviously that British Airways option at the end is by far the best price -- but it turns up on none of the other search engines. However, I'd imagine that most casual fliers have no idea, and I wonder if many people end up booking multi-city flight options, not realizing that they could save a ton by booking the exact same flights individually.

At best, it appears to be Righthaven Lite. It doesn't sound like they'll totally pull a Righthaven, where their first move is to sue, but rather (from the various vague descriptions) it sounds like NewsRight will be going around simply trying to get blogs and aggregators to buy a license. But here's the thing: on what legal basis? That's the part that's not clear. Much of what blogs and newspapers do is simply not infringing (even if the AP likes to pretend it is). There may be some extreme cases where there is infringement, but most standard cases seem like classic fair use. And that's where it gets worrisome that this turns into a legal shakedown -- whereby sites are pressured to pay up just to avoid a legal fight, no matter how strong the legal position of these sites might be.

But, much more to the point, nothing in this plan appears to be about adding value. That's the key way to determine if a business model is heading in the right direction, or if it's really just someone trying to "free ride" on the work of someone else. NewsRight appears to be the worst kind of free rider, honestly. They're not adding any value -- they're just demanding people pay up to avoid a negative cost (the legal threat). Also telling? The company admits that half the staff is... lawyers, and that appears to include the company's CEO. When your 11-person company employs multiple full-time lawyers, you're not innovating. You're abusing the law. This seems like a complete disaster in the making -- and not because "information wants to be free." But because NewsRight doesn't appear to provide anything of actual value to sites. All it does is carry a big stick around and say, "pay us if you don't want to get whacked." I'm sure some sites will pay, but it's difficult to see how this adds anything of value to the world.

from the blog-aggregator? dept

There's been this a lot of talk about "aggregators" recently -- often in the context of traditional newspapers claiming that such aggregators are somehow damaging their business. As we've discussed in the past, if you look at the details, there's little evidence that aggregators are really the issue. Instead, many of the complaints appear to be confusing a correlation of their own business declines with the rise of aggregators, and falsely believing there's a causal relationship when there's little, if any, evidence to support that.

However, that's not going to stop ongoing legal actions from those publishers against the aggregators they believe are a problem. One reason for this is that the specific legal situation at times can be a bit vague, as internet aggregators are quite different than past businesses. If you're interested in this subject, you should absolutely read Kimberly Isbell's very thorough look at the legal issues related to online aggregators. She very carefully breaks out the different types of aggregators (though, I'm a bit surprised that people seriously consider commentary blogs to be "aggregators") as well as the specific legal issues facing each of the different aggregators. The problem, which becomes clear, is that the law is not anywhere close to settled on the key issues, and leave an awful lot of key questions up to the interpretation of whatever judge gets the cases in question. We've discussed in the past the idea that it's often possible to take the "fair use" factors and interpret them in either direction (something is or is not fair use), and the same may be true with "hot news" in some cases as well. That's a problem, and makes both concepts somewhat useless and dangerous as well. If you have a law where the boundaries are incredibly vague, unclear, and up to the whims of a randomly selected judge, it leads to potentially damaging situations, where people avoid liability by not even trying to do certain things for fear of getting sued.

The concept of hot news is now being tested in a few different courts, so we can be hopeful that within a few years, perhaps, the courts will dump the concept entirely as a violation of the First Amendment (an analysis that hasn't been done yet), but with that question still up in the air, there's still a chance that a confused court could rule otherwise, creating a massively damaging situation for value added content services online.

from the yikes dept

We've spent a long time detailing the massive problems that come up when you build up an unnecessary collection society bureaucracy for something like music. Operations like ASCAP lead to massive inefficiencies in the market, greater protectionism and a never-ending quest for more control over perfectly reasonable free uses. And, worst of all, they tend to distort markets in such ways that it harms up-and-coming creators by pricing the venues they rely on to establish themselves right out of the market. So, I have to admit that I'm somewhat horrified to hear that some are now seriously proposing an ASCAP-like offering for the non-problem of online news.

There are so many problems with this suggestion it's difficult to know where to start. The biggest of all, however, is that the "problem" this is seeking to solve hasn't been shown to have been a problem at all. Newspapers and the AP keep claiming that there's an "aggregator problem," but we went looking for it and we can't find it. The problem is that the AP and others change the definition of who's a problem depending on what they're talking about. Sometimes its sites like Google. But Google isn't really a problem because Google shows headlines and barely a snippet. That's clearly fair use and drives traffic (hell, the entire SEO industry depends on that). So, it's not Google that's the problem. At the other end of the spectrum you have scraper spam sites, but those are fly-by-night, get no traffic and aren't "taking" any real ad revenue away from the original content creators at all. Also, they're certainly not going to pay into any ASCAP-like scheme. Who's left? In the middle you have a few smaller players, like Newser, who basically rewrite some stories, but they're tiny.

So what problem is this bureaucratic mess trying to actually solve? I can't figure it out, but putting together a giant bureaucracy will require a ton of overhead, and all that money is pure waste from an economic standpoint. So, before we start talking about an ASCAP for news, can someone please define what the actual problem is? Because it's certainly not this general "aggregator" menace that we keep hearing about.